I Want To Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference. Technical Report No. 37.

Sperling, Melanie

This study examined the teaching and learning of writing for secondary school students as it occurred in the interactive context of teacher-student writing conferences in the form of private teacher-student conversations about the students' writing or writing process. Following ethnographic procedures, the study examined naturally occurring conferences in a ninth-grade English class for six case study students. Covering an observation period of 6 weeks, collected data included audio and video tapes of conference talk, audio and video tapes of all other class activities, observational field notes, interviews with the teacher and focal students, and all drafts of focal student writing. A descriptive quantitative discourse analysis of conference talk across students and descriptive qualitative case study analyses for each of the six students showed the writing conference to occasion a kind of teacher-student collaboration in which the teacher assumed a special leadership role. Collaboration was seen as a shifting process shaped not only by conference participants but by the rhetorical circumstances of their talk; and collaboration was described along a continuum, varying both across students and with each student at different times. (Six tables of data are included; 47 references and 4 appendixes containing samples of coded conversation and student papers are attached.) (Author/KEH)